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The Equal Pay Act 1970 (which came into operation on 29 December 1975) provides for an “equality clause” to be written into all contracts of employment. S.1(2) (a) of the 1970 Act (which has been amended by the Sex Discrimination Act 1975) provides:

The TUC is opposed to the decision by the British Government to abolish wages councils, which if successful will worsen the pay and conditions of the 2.6 million workers covered by them, and many other low paid workers who use the rates set as reference points. Drawing on theoretical literature and empirical research, explores the arguments for and against abolition and discusses the case for a statutory national minimum wage. Concludes by arguing that the case for abolition is far from proven on economic and social grounds, and that the introduction of a statutory national minimum wage, combined with other active labour market intervention by the Government, is needed to overcome the problem of low pay.

The Government appointed a Low Pay Commission to advise on the level of the initial rate, and subsequently accepted all the Commission’s recommendations in principle, while taking a more cautious line on young workers. The National Minimum Wage will make a real difference to around two million low‐paid workers, but without significant extra cost to businesses – an addition of around 0.6 per cent to the UK wage bill. Some critics have argued for a higher initial rate, based on a mechanistic formula. But a rate which takes no account of prevailing economic circumstances or the dynamic nature of the labour market will not help low‐paid workers. It is also important to listen to employees and employers, the low paid and the low paying and reflect their views. The Low Pay Commission, which embodies the principles of social partnership, played a key role in this process.

This paper aims to examine the employment effect of the minimum wage in Mauritius, a country that has recently introduced an economy-wide national minimum wage. As women have low labor force participation rate and higher unemployment rate compared to men, this study sheds light on the impact of the national minimum wage on male and female employment.

A conceptual framework based on the labor–leisure model of Blundell et al. (2007) incorporating the minimum wage as an important variable influencing the employment decision of the individual serves as the methodological backdrop of this paper. It applies the difference-in-difference estimation technique and uses micro data from the Continuous Multi-Purpose Household Survey for the period 2017–2019.

The results show that minimum wage has a significant negative impact on overall employment. With the imposition of the national minimum wage, the probability that an individual, currently earning less than the minimum wage, remains employed is 0.525 lower than that of a worker earning above the minimum wage level. Moreover, using sex-disaggregated data, the analysis demonstrates the negative employment effects of the minimum wage adversely impact women more than men.

This is a first attempt to estimate the effect of the newly introduced national minimum wage on employment in Mauritius. While the effects of a minimum wage vary across different segments of the economy, this study adopts a gender perspective by comparing the impact of the minimum wage on male and female employment.

The paper provides an account of the working of the Low Pay Commission that was established to advise on the introduction of a statutory National Minimum Wage for the UK. It discusses the way in which the Commission was constituted and the consultation procedures and research methods it developed over its first four years. An account is provided of the principles the Commission developed and of the problems that had to be overcome in delivering what proved to be a successful labour market intervention.

After 15 years of successful operation, the British Low Pay Commission’s management of the National Minimum Wage was threatened in 2015 by the government’s introduction the National Living Wage. The purpose of this paper is to consider the underlying principles of previous minimum wage fixing, and the additional thinking of the Living Wage Foundation and the review of the issue by the Resolution Foundation.

The paper draws on the 2016 reports of the Commission to argue that the two statutory wages are unavoidably interlinked and are tied to incompatible criteria.

The paper concludes that the predicted eventual impact of the National Living Wage on the labour market will be unsustainable.

The paper is relevant to minimum wage research.

The paper is relevant to minimum wage policy.

The paper is relevant to low pay policy.

The paper provides original analysis of minimum wage policy.

The minimum wage has been regarded as an important element of public policy for reducing poverty and inequality. Increasing the minimum wage is supposed to raise earnings for millions of low-wage workers and therefore lower earnings inequality. However, there is no consensus in the existing literature from industrialized countries regarding whether increasing the minimum wage has helped lower earnings inequality. China has recently exhibited rapid economic growth and widening earnings inequality. Since China promulgated new minimum wage regulations in 2004, the magnitude and frequency of changes in the minimum wage have been substantial, both over time and across jurisdictions. The growing importance of research on the relationship between the minimum wage and earnings inequality and its controversial nature have sparked heated debate in China, highlighting the importance of rigorous research to inform evidence-based policy making. We investigate the contribution of the minimum wage to the well-documented rise in earnings inequality in China from 2004 to 2009 by using city-level minimum wage panel data and a representative Chinese household survey, and we find that increasing the minimum wage reduces inequality – by decreasing the earnings gap between the median and the bottom decile – over the analysis period.

Minimum wage fixing came to be increasingly questioned during the 1980s owing to high unemployment and the rise of liberal economic thinking. This led many countries to dilute minimum wage protection by freezing the rates or altering the coverage. However, close examination of the relevant research reveals that empirical support for the criticisms of minimum wages is fairly weak and fragmented. At the end of the 1980s and beginning of the 1990s, many countries, Great Britain being a notable exception, pursued a more active minimum wage policy. Concludes with a re‐examination of the goals and form of minimum wage legislation in the light of recent history.

Looks at the 2000 Employment Research Unit Annual Conference held at the University of Cardiff in Wales on 6/7 September 2000. Spotlights the 76 or so presentations within and shows that these are in many, differing, areas across management research from: retail finance; precarious jobs and decisions; methodological lessons from feminism; call centre experience and disability discrimination. These and all points east and west are covered and laid out in a simple, abstract style, including, where applicable, references, endnotes and bibliography in an easy‐to‐follow manner. Summarizes each paper and also gives conclusions where needed, in a comfortable modern format.